Sexy Stats

September 30, 2010

Nick Momrik

You may have noticed a change to your stat charts a couple of weeks ago. We ditched Flash in place of a more robust charting library called Flot. If you didn’t notice, go check it out because you can view all of the new charts with modern browsers including mobile devices such as iPhone and iPad. Sooo sexy! Today we updated the charts to use bars instead of points and lines. We’ve also made the stats page super sexy.

Each module can be opened and closed, moved, or hidden completely. If you don’t want to see a module, minimize it with one click or use the Screen Options to keep it out of sight. Customize everything and view stats the way you want to.

As you hover over each bar in the chart it changes color and displays a tooltip, giving you more information about the data. If the chart is showing data by day, Saturdays and Sundays have a light gray background to make it easier to see weekly patterns. Under the chart you’ll notice a new area, called “fortune cookies,” where we’ll highlight key stats.

During the redesign we went with bar charts because the end of one day and the beginning of another shouldn’t be connected. Each day starts at zero and we think bar charts work much better for this type of data. We hope you’ll agree once you get used to the change.

In this first phase of the stats redesign we’ve focused on the main page. This will allow us to collect feedback from you so we can tweak everything as we go. We’ve only mentioned a few of the highlights here, so take your stats for a drive around town to get used to the feel. Let us know what you like and what you might change. As we gather feedback we’ll apply a bit of sexy to the other stat pages.

Sites using our Stats plugin on a self-hosted blog will see an update after we iterate on the new design.

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Hey Nick! Just peeped at the stats thing after getting your blog alert. I don’t use the thing much to be honest but I do like the little note at the bottom where it’s affirmed our own visits are not logged. Would be nice to see who popped in, perhaps:-)

Don’t know if this has been discussed. The most important stat to me is returning visitors — it helps me to see through the fluff. Any chance that could happen? (though I can see that holding the data would be consumptive)

I suppose I’m in the minority but I really don’t like this at all. The page is way too busy and hard to focus on. I understand the desire to improve things but the constant fiddling with things drives me a bit bats. I’d like the option to switch back to the ‘old view’ – like a lot of programs do, like gmail. If you don’t like the new changes you can use the view/mode that you like. If I had this option, I would be happy.

I liked the lines better than the charts, and i liked being able to see yesterday, and today instead of having to click on yesterday, and I liked being able to see my subscribers, instead of having to click on that as well. But it does look cool, just not as user friendly imo.

Thank you for changing this to a bar graph. I didn’t really like the last change, but didn’t know how to get it changed ! I like a bar graph. It is easy to read at a quick glance, which I make frequently.

When I signed into WordPress today I was blown away by the new stats. They look awesome. As I am new on WordPress and don’t know anything about driving traffic to my site your new stats chart makes it look as if I had a flood of visitors. Wow you made my day. Thanks for your effort.

Okay, thank you WordPress for putting so much effort into making an already marvelous free service better and better. I usually don’t complain about the upgrades, and get annoyed at people who do. All the other changes are great, but I don’t really like the bar charts. They’re too… blocky. lol. It’d be nice if we could customize our stat page even more, and pick how to view the stats?

I like it, it is pretty, but is there a way, to see how many hits one particular post gets throughout time? I want to know which one of my posts is the most popular? Thanks, keep doing the great work you do for all of us. Really, you folks amaze me….Have a great day. Elena

Oh, sorry to rant again, but you have reduced the font size and many times, when people reach 40 smaller font is hard to read. Therefore, you must be a bunch of young things that don’t know to consider the generations. Cheer up! You will learn – We HOPE!!

Another point … it’s just a detail but ideally I’d like to see the “number of visits” labels (1,000, 2,000, etc) on the right axis as well as / instead of on the left – simply because the right axis is adjacent to the latest day/week/month, which is usually the day/week/month of most interest.

Don’t know about this. These are STATS, I want them to be informative, not pretty. If the new design wouldn’t take four times as long to load as the old one, I’d say this was a change for the better… but it does, so I don’t.

It might be nice, if it was functional… Half of my bars don’t seem to work (show the post/visit information) when I’m in the Site Stats screen, and the last three days don’t work when I’m on the dashboard… I’m afraid I liked the line graph better thus far… Better luck next time at trying to wow me, WordPress… >.<

There is a bug with IE 7 we are working on. If you are using IE 7 hovering does not work properly on the right side of the charts. I would suggest upgrading to IE 8 for a much better experience in general. Hopefully we’ll have the bug fixed soon though.

I guess I’ll get used to it but I really liked the stats page with the average views per day and week, views per month, the calendar of the views each day. Where has it disappeared to? It really helped see in one glance which days of the week are weakest, etc.
Also, I agree with the comment that returning visitors would be a good improvement. Unique visitors too. Views are nice but it doesn’t allow us to figure out if we have one crazy fan or a legion of loyal readers. 😉

In the earlier chart, we could read the values, but that option does not seem to be there in the bar chart. For example, if I want to know how many visits I had last month,how do I read that value in the bar chart ?

Censoring comments that express another view on your work is a nice way to promote WordPress, guys!

Still, this new feature doesn’t work well. Still, it is not that easy and clear. Still, the Stats Tables of averages retrospectively should be back. And by the way, the new stats take the same time lapse to show as the old ones.

Normally change tends to bug me a little… but these changes are really good.

I especially like the weekends being highlighted (lowlighted?) in a pale grey, and the days of the week also being added. The way syndicated views are displayed and labelled makes more sense now as well. Overall, good stuff.

It would be nice to see a “trend line” added to, showing a 10 or 30 days moving average, extrapolated forwards, but I guess that’s just the stats wonk in me! 🙂

I definitely prefer lines over bars. Absolutely. Bars in statistics are ugly and harder to read in certain aspects. In addition bars seem to cut the statistic from one day to the other, there’s no connection. But with points and lines you have this connection. Looks more user friendly imo. And as someone else pointed out you see trends better. Therefore I would prefer an option where you can choose between points/lines, bars and maybe even a third option like cakes or something for displaying it. However I do like the how the other stats are displayed now. More intuitive. But whenever I click in “Top Posts & Pages” on yesterday there are no entries displayed anymore ven when switching back to today. It’s the same with search terms. Only refreshing the stats brings it back. Aaand you still have to translate “Site Stats” to “Blogstatistik” for the German users.^^

I love that the all time views and total daily views are up near the top of the page now.

Feature request: for today and yesterday, I’d like to see how much traffic came in during which hour… I guess it would be an “Hours” tab like “Days” “Weeks” “Months”. For those of us with really popular blogs and a lot of content, it helps us understand what kind of impact our actions have depending on the time of day we do them.

Where did you put the numbers about my subscribers? Everything was all on one page before, I’m not sure I like having to click tabs for everything now, but okay. Just please get me my subscriber stats back please.

I prefer the points and lines. It is much easier to view that way, especially as I consider 1am WordPress time as belonging to the previous day, not the morning. Meaning, if I get many views between midnight and 1am, I consider those belonging to the previous day. The line chart provided a more fluid look at these late-night views. Now, they are isolated into the bar of the following day.

On a more technical, user-interface point, it seems I only get the yellow mouse-over info for several bars earlier in the month, not more recent bars -despite the fact that I posted an entry last night (before midnight).

Too much clicking and returning involved with all those tabs. Very time consuming to get the same data that was all on one screen previously. And the View All screen for the longer time periods has been summarized even further which was too short to begin with. Sometimes it’s useful to know which items are having the least views but that is impossible here. If there were some depth to the stats, such as those which sitemeter gives it might be worth all the clicking. The charts do load faster which is one plus.

From a theoretical stand point the bars make a lot of sense, but visually I enjoyed watching the flow from one day to the next. The rest of the redesign I love for as little as I’ve messed with it. Especially the fortune cookie at the top. And the fact that it will work on my iPod touch is a welcome bonus.

No reason to have to click to view yesterday’s info versus today, they should be listed one above the other like before; the new bars are ok, I suppose, but mine don’t highlight when I hover my pointer over them.

I think the bars do make more sense then points/lines and I’m sure I’ll get used to it shortly. The thing I’d really, really, really like to see is the ability to change how many days/weeks/months are shown in the graph.

Also if I wanted to nit-pick, I’d say the blue color picked is a bit too light especially when looking at the stat graph for a single post that’s over 2 years old. It’d be nice to have a few different color styles too choose from.

I think that many, if not most, of the people who are commenting that they prefer the old line charts to the new bar charts will change their minds given enough time. We get attached to certain graphic depictions, even when something better comes along. Give it time and you will see the wisdom of what WordPress has done – that is, they are absolutely right when they say that bar charts are a more accurate way to depict this kind of data. We have just become accustomed to an inferior representation. With time, we’ll adjust…and appreciate the improvement.